Through the Looking Glass

A chronicle of the absurd, in politics and life

Friday, November 21, 2003

Am I the only person mourning the days of lost innocence, when we could all still think of Paris Hilton as a hotel?

(Seriously, a lot of the current furor surrounding her is a bit of a mystery to me. She's a young woman with a private life and a right to it -- about whom the worst I can really say is that despite all the things she was born to, I'm not yet aware of anything she's done that the rest of us have any reason to care about...)

An Australian journalist recently tried to fly into the US for an interview with Olivia Newton-John about breast
cancer. She came away with a much better story, her own first-hand experience with how Dubya's crew is defending freedom in the grand old U.S. of A:

"Their justification for refusing me was that under American law ... [they] have the right to refuse a foreign journalist entry," she said.

"They said to me you don't understand, you have no choice, no rights here under American law."

A frequent business traveller to the US, Ms Smethurst said she still did not know why she was detained although she asked repeatedly what the issue was.

"Their words to me were: we will tell you when we have a problem and your silence is appreciated."

During the ordeal, "innocuous items" like lipliners and make-up - deemed "a national security threat" - were taken from her, she said.

At the end of this -- which included a full-body search, according to other reports, she was deported, with no reason given.

Remember, they're defending freedom. It's their opponents (of all stripes) who are the enemies of freedom. That makes it all a little easier to take.

More: I'm blogging tired this morning, which is why it didn't occur to me immediately to mention Maher Arar, who has rather more of a complaing, having been deported from an American airport to Syria for eight months of torture despite having not actually attempted to enter this country. That's via Jeanne D'Arc, who elsewhere discusses American claims that Syria had promised not to torture Arar; she's too polite to say that, particularly in the light of the Dubya crew's record, they're obvious lies...

Thursday, November 20, 2003

In the wake of the terrorist attacks in Istanbul today, Tony Blair explained
in a press conference the importance of Iraq in the struggle against
terrorism:

... here is why Iraq is important in this: because in the
end [the terrorists'] case ... is that we are in Iraq to suppress
Muslims, steal their oil, to spoil the country. Now we know, you
know, that all those things are lies. They know therefore that if we
manage to get Iraq on its feet as a stable, prosperous, democratic
country, the blow we strike is not just one for the Iraqi people, it
is the end of that propaganda and that is why they are fighting us.

True enough, as far as it goes, though the terrorists wouldn't be
able to make that case if we hadn't invaded Iraq in the first place
(which is one of the reasons that I, among others, argued
that the attack might be a bad idea).

But while you can't disagree that we should "get Iraq on
its feet as a stable, prosperous, democratic country" if it's at all
possible, it's a different question whether anything our troops are
doing now actually contributes to that end. As I noted
last week, it's not obvious to me that they are actually helping.
The feel-good press releases from Centcom about painting schoolhouses
don't amount to much; the Iraqis could paint their own schoolhouses
perfectly well if our troops weren't in the way. Our assistance in
business has been inept at best, as in the case
of an Iraqi cement plant, fixed up by the Iraqis themselves for
half a million dollars because they couldn't wait for the $23 million
boondoggle proposed by US Army engineers.

And the troops are unable
to guard agencies like the Red Cross, which have been chased out by the
"insurgents". Increasingly, they're being pushed back onto their own
bases, from which they emerge only on heavily armored raids that do
nothing to win over the Iraqis. Kevin Sites, embedded in Tikrit,
paints a
frightening picture of the isolation of US commanders:

The Army, which has turned acronyms into the opposite of their
intended use of making things easier to remember, calls its
battlefield information headquarters a TOC, short for Tactical
Operations Center. There the commander sits flanked by his XO,
executive officer, battle captains, S2 (intelligence officer) and S3
(operations officer) sucking in the information flow and knitting
together daily missions that help them to accomplish their overall
mission.

In the TOC in Tikrit, 1st Brigade, 4th Infantry commander Colonel
James Hickey, tells me the mission here is to, "defeat the enemy and
stabilize the region." The enemy as he defines it is FRL's (former
regime loyalists) like Baathists and the Fedayeen. ...
Unlike some soldiers, he is not confused about his mission. It is not
for hearts and minds, but to defeat the enemy. ...
He has a reputation for being one of the most aggressive commanders in
the theatre -- and if things goes well here, he likely get his first
general's star.

"I have a military problem here and I'm applying a military solution,"
he says with complete confidence. "Our adversaries are not militarily
effective. They are mercenaries, terrorists and pirates and they will
be defeated."

... in this room, where every piece of information is broken down
quantitatively--number of patrols, number of raids, number of IEDs
(improvised explosive devices), number of detainees, number of weapons
-- and put back together in the form of a task completed or a mission
to be accomplished, Operation Thunder Road, Operation Ivy Cyclone, the
problems and solutions seem remarkably clear an seductively simple.

Blips show up in the map on the TOC, are identified as targets, and
are disabled, by the application of whatever force is required --
lately, around Tikrit as all over Iraq, including aircraft and missile strikes. And here's
what it looks like to Iraqis on the ground:

...residents expressed bewilderment at the offensive and the choice of
targets in territory fully controlled by coalition forces, and said
there was no sign of any guerrilla activity in the area before the
strikes.

"They (the Americans) called on us from the tanks to stay at home
because they were going to hit targets and they also said: 'If you
want to watch our show you can go to the rooftops,'" Hamziya Ali, a
housewife living near the plant, said Wednesday.

"But me and my children spent the night shaking. We do not want to be
their targets. Yesterday, they hit the factory and open fields which
have not been used by any resistance members."

The Iraqis are wondering: why hit an open field? They don't
understand: it's a target on a map. And it has been disabled. And so
that patch of grass will never threaten Americans again. But the people
who got bombed -- now they have a reason, as Riverbend, writing from Baghdad, explains in her outraged response to Col. Hickey's attacks on Tikrit:

How can that ass of a president say things are getting better in Iraq when his troops have stooped to destroying homes?! Is that a sign that things are getting better? When you destroy someone's home and detain their family, why would they want to go on with life? Why wouldn't they want to lob a bomb at some 19-year-old soldier from Missouri?!

The troops were pushing women and children shivering with fear out the door in the middle of the night. What do you think these children think to themselves- being dragged out of their homes, having their possessions and houses damaged and burned?! Who do you think is creating the 'terrorists'?!! Do you think these kids think to themselves, "Oh well- we learned our lesson. That's that. Yay troops!" It's like a vicious, moronic circle and people are outraged…

But how can she understand the military details of the situation? She
may speak the language, while most of our officers don't, but they've
got a TOC, an XO, and a really slick map.

(A note to trolls: why no, I'm not blaming the troops for this
mess. I'm blaming the officers, and their superiors in Washington.
If your notion of "supporting the troops" is supporting a policy that
gets them killed and maimed in large numbers to no useful purpose,
you certainly have a right to it).

Perhaps the best we could achieve along these lines is to hand
political power to a faction which seems best able to keep it -- say,
one of the main Shiite factions (since they're the majority), with
sufficient guarantees for everyone else that they won't immediately
start blowing things up. This would, in effect, make us the
handmaiden to a Shiite theocracy -- certainly not what the "beacon of
democracy" crowd had in mind when we started this mess. But it may be
the best achievable outcome.

Does that sound defeatist? Unpatriotic? Tell it to the
"administration officials" who more or less floated
the idea in today's New York Times. Why, oh why, do these people
hate America?

Speaking of the "beacon of democracy" crowd, by the
way, Daniel Pipes, who was a member of that crowd before the war, is
saying something
rather different now:

"We have no, no moral
responsibility to the Iraqi people," he said. "Our moral
responsibility is to ourselves. I very much disagree with the name
'Operation Iraqi Freedom.' It should have been 'Operation American
Security.'" This met with applause.
"Our goal is not a free Iraq," Pipes continued. "Our goal is an Iraq
that does not endanger us." What we need, he says, is a
"democratic-minded strongman."

The contrast with Blair's remarks this morning
couldn't be more stark. And anyone who speaks of "a
democratic-minded strongman" is lost in a wilderness of the mind where
words have no meaning. But let's try to take his words at face value
anyway. There's no reason to believe Iraq was endangering us when we
started this. There were no weapons of mass destruction. And, no
matter how much Douglas Feith keeps shopping around the same
cherry-picked hints and rumors of some sort of connection between
Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, they still
don't amount to much. As Pipes' motives shift and mutate, I'm
reminded somewhat of Col. Kurtz's report in Heart
of Darkness:

... it was a beautiful piece of writing. The opening paragraph, however,
in the light of later information, strikes me now as ominous. He began
with the argument that we whites, from the point of development we had
arrived at, 'must necessarily appear to them [savages] in the nature
of supernatural beings -- we approach them with the might as of a
deity,' and so on, and so on. 'By the simple exercise of our will we
can exert a power for good practically unbounded,' etc., etc. From
that point he soared and took me with him. The peroration was
magnificent, though difficult to remember, you know. It gave me the
notion of an exotic Immensity ruled by an august Benevolence. It made
me tingle with enthusiasm. This was the unbounded power of eloquence
-- of words -- of burning noble words. There were no practical hints
to interrupt the magic current of phrases, unless a kind of note at
the foot of the last page, scrawled evidently much later, in an
unsteady hand, may be regarded as the exposition of a method. It was
very simple, and at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic
sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of
lightning in a serene sky: 'Exterminate all the brutes!'

...the hatred the establishment feels against Dean has
nothing to do with ideology. Dean hasn't paid his dues with the
establishment. Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi has made his name
working the campaigns of insurgent (hence anti-establishment)
candidates like Jerry Brown. He is not part of the chummy inside-DC
club of Democratic Party consultants.

If Dean wins the nominantion, he becomes the head of the Democratic
Party. He gets to replace McAuliffe and fill the top ranks at the
DNC. Suddenly, a "DNC Chairman Joe Trippi" is a real possibility, and
for an establishment that has spent the better half of the last decade
laughing at Trippi's antics and dismissing him as a kook are suddenly
standing on shaky ground.

And he quotes just about all of a Ryan Lizza TNR article in support
of the proposition.

If so, then it would appear that the Democratic leadership has become a
chummy insider group that is more concerned with preserving its own
position and hobnobbing with other members of a self-defined "in
crowd" than actually hitting the hustings. A proposition borne out by
other things that Kos and Lizza don't discuss in detail -- they
mention the importance of Dean's endorsement by the SEIU, a large and
rising union, but don't say why he won it, which turns
out to be apropos:

The SEIU offered all the candidates the same resources: a
list of their local leadership and a warning that the route to the
endorsement began not in Stern's fifth-floor office on L Street NW but
through the rank and file. "Everybody got the same advice," an SEIU
official said. "Howard Dean took it to heart." No other candidate came
close to Dean's outreach. "Shockingly" not close, Stern said.

Dean did outreach and mobilized the base. The favored candidates
of the insiders just tried to get chummy with the leadership, sure
that that would be enough. And that is why they failed.

And the chummy insider-ness is a style of politics that translates
into a style of governing -- as with the Clinton healthcare debacle,
where a policy decided on by horsetrading in a famously closed room
could not be passed because the opponents did a good job of selling
the opposition, in part with a "folks like us" ad campaign (Harry and
Louise) which the Democrats -- then in control of the White House and
Senate -- simply couldn't match.

Looking in from the outside, it's difficult to avoid the impression
that whatever you think of Republicans' policies, some of their
complaints about "liberal elitist" attitudes are correct --
that the Democratic party apparatus just doesn't like dealing with and
mobilizing large numbers of grubby, ordinary folks. And so they wind
up trying to take the politics out of politics. And that is why they
fail.

Kos puts most of this attitude on the "Clinton
crowd", by the way, which is a bit of a paradox -- Clinton did win,
after all. But the exception probes the rule -- he won his first
national election guided by a maverick outsider, Carville, who was
looking from the outside in after that.

Late note: As Nathan Newman has been pointing out for a while now,
the liberal prediliction for trying to win political victories through the courts can be seen as
another symptom of the same disease...

So, it's not just that we're knocking down
houses of people merely suspected of hosting guerillas in Iraq --
punishing not just them, but their families, in apparent violation of
the Geneva conventions. We now find, buried in this article
on how it really is Iraqis doing all this, and not mysterious foreign
infiltrators, little nuggets like so:

But the strike illustrated what military officials said was a new
twist to their counterinsurgency campaign: attack bomb-making
factories, weapons warehouses, guerrilla meeting places and
insurgents' homes with no warning, using high-altitude bombing or
long-range missile strikes. Officials indicated that it was clear the
general's house was being used as a meeting place.

"This approach gives us more tactical surprise," a military
official said. "They're still using houses and neighborhoods, but
we've been removing sanctuaries and keeping them off balance."

Gosh, I hope we're as sure about these
"bomb-making factories" as we were earlier
about the highly specialized chemical weapons trucks on Powell's satellite imagery.

We can be sure, of course, that we've knocked down a house. And we
also know how much trouble we're causing the guerillas by doing that.
They have to meet in somebody else's house. And they also have to
deal with the costs of training and assimilating a few new recruits.

But this campaign clearly begins to address one need spelled out by
Rumsfeld in that memo from last month -- this campaign clearly lends
itself to a "metric", and a kinder, gentler one than the one made
famous in that last war. How long till we start hearing about the
building count?

Tuesday, November 18, 2003

Paul Krugman today is shrill on the subject of the mutual fund scandals, lucidly explaining them in his usual lucid, cogent shriek. But the SEC is on the case. They're dealing with the problem. Consider what they've already achieved in their settlement with the Putnam mutual funds company:

The settlement with the S.E.C. did not outline what penalties or fines would be paid by Putnam. Restitution will be determined later. As is customary, Putnam neither admitted nor denied the accusations.

So what did the commission extract from Putnam in the quickie deal? An independent board of directors, something the company previously claimed to have; compliance controls, which the company was already supposed to have; and employee trading restrictions, which Putnam should have had all along.

They sure are tough negotiators down there at the S.E.C. Fund companies that have turned up abusive trading practices in their own shops will surely cheer this settlement and line up to receive their own version.

Which, of course, helps to deal with the problem, by giving the fund companies something that they can point to in assuring their marks investors that the problem has been dealt with.

Monday, November 17, 2003

The latest from marketers unclear on the concept: "The Cat in the Hat Movie Storybook". This features stills from the new Mike Myers movie, which are, I guess, supposed to be an improvement on the original drawings by Doctor Seuss.

Speaking of which, Myers in his hatted cat-suit is all over the post office. I just hope the producers are paying the post office for this pathetic promotional palaver, and not the reverse...

It's pretty clear at this point that the California energy crisis of a
few years' back was, at the very least, severely aggravated by power
traders who were gouging
customers of the utilities -- which is to say, just about everyone
in the state. Advocates of energy deregulation say that the problem
isn't with deregulation per se, but that deregulation as
implemented in California was flawed and open to exploitation by
the power companies. How, then do we structure
power grid deregulation so as to prevent this?

The Republican draft of the energy bill released on
Saturday would, for the first time, let the electric industry set
mandatory rules for using its transmission grid, subject to government
approval.

So, if we set the foxes to guarding the henhouse, they'll be way
too busy to go for the meat. This is, of course, one of several
brilliant schemes in this energy bill -- all, of course, entirely
for the public benefit.

Meanwhile, back in the burbs, the hollowing out of the middle class
continues:

... 43 million people in the United States ... lack
health insurance, and their numbers are rapidly increasing because of
ever soaring cost and job losses. Many states, including Texas, are
also cutting back on subsidies for health care, further increasing the
number of people with no coverage.

The majority of the uninsured are neither poor by official
standards nor unemployed. They are accountants like Mr. Thornton,
employees of small businesses, civil servants, single working mothers
and those working part time or on contract.

"Now it's hitting people who look like you and me, dress like you
and me, drive nice cars and live in nice houses but can't afford
$1,000 a month for health insurance for their families," said R. King
Hillier, director of legislative relations for Harris County, which
includes Houston.

Which is absolutely fine for people -- until they start having
trouble swallowing, or get a strange rash or a few odd aches, at which
point they more or less have to let it slide until it becomes an
emergency -- and a far more expensive thing to treat than it would
have been earlier.

There are a bunch of aggravating factors here -- aside from the
soaring cost of insurance, per se -- which this particular article
doesn't discuss. For instance, uninsured patients can wind up getting
caught in the crossfire between hospitals and insurance companies.
It's now standard
practice for hospitals to set outrageously high "base rates" for
treatment, so they can negotiate deep "discounts" with insurers and still
make a profit. But the uninsured don't have anyone to negotiate
"discounts" on their behalf, so they wind up getting billed the outrageous "full rate", in
extreme cases, more than eight
times as much as an insurance company.

The upshot to all of this is personal bankruptcy... oh, what was
that about bankruptcy
reform?